It really is all about the yarn. You’ve heard me say that when I talk about my approach to weaving, because the color and texture of yarn is more important in my work than complexity of the weave structure.
When the yarn looks like this, it REALLY is ALL about the yArN.
I spun all this yarn in one fabulous weekend workshop with Jacey Boggs of Insubordiknit.
Jacey is a gifted teacher. She guided the twenty of us through each technique by calling up small groups to stand behind her as she demonstrated. Then, as we went back to our spinning wheels to practice, we got to hear the instructions repeated three more times as she called the other groups up in turn. This really reinforces the learning. See it. Hear it. Do it.
Working hard. Taking breaks to look out the window at the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s the same view as my new office space. I’d rather be spinning, of course.
Taking this class in NYC was a good idea. I had a chance to meet and hang out with many of the local fiberati. Familiar names from Ravelry now have faces.
I was essentially the only weaver-spinner in a room full of knitter-spinners. I’m sure a couple of people are going to rush out and get looms. This yarn is made for freestyle weaving.
If you are spinning to weave, here are a couple of things to consider:
-Don’t wet-finish the yarn after spinning. Just steam it enough to get the kinks out. It will be wet-finished along with the other yarns in the fabric.
-What you see is very close to what you get. Knitters space their inclusions, coils or cocoons farther apart, because knitting takes up a lot of the intervening yarn. Weaving doesn’t consume as much, so space them where you want to see them.
-Over-spun yarn creates a collapse weave effect. I madly over-spun some of my yarn while learning the techniques. I’m prepared to be happily surprised by what happens in wet-finishing.
The yarn? You want to see close ups of yarn?
This little bowl was woven on my Journey Loom, using Recycled Sari silk yarn and cotton rug warp. I beat the weaving well with a small tapestry beater, and the resulting bowl is quite firm.
Through the lens, looking at a different part of the fabric, you can see that this is a warp-faced fabric, and you can see the multi-color fibers of the sari silk stripes in the weft. The square is 1 inch, and the magnification is 6X. A quick count shows 36 epi (ends per inch)and 10 ppi (picks per inch). Don’t forget to count across 2 rows to accommodate for the warps that go behind the weft on the first row.
The pictures are easy to take under bright lights. All I had to do was place the camera lens over the pick glass and wiggle the camera around until the entire square came into view. Afterwards, I used Photoshop to reduce the picture size. The original image is four times larger than what is shown here. I also cropped the picture tightly to the image shown through the pick glass lens.
The grey yarn at the top is Twilight, a wool and alpaca twist, raised and spun by Barbara Parry of 
I didn’t even photograph the aisles and aisles of knitting yarns. The spinning and weaving sections were enough to keep me busy for a couple of hours of happy shopping.
